


Moving On

by CaptainXeno, Stormbutterfly



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Cait (Fallout) - Freeform, Canon-Typical Drug Use, Canon-Typical Violence, Combat, Dark, Drug Use, F/M, Film Noir, Gun Violence, Gunplay, Hunters & Hunting, Ill-advised attempt to write a Dark Tower vibe in a Burning Chrome style, Mild Gore, Preston Garvey - Freeform, Strong (Super Mutant) (Fallout 4), Sturges (Fallout 4), UST, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Tension, Vignette, Yao Guai, bad communication skills, lots of tension, mood piece, poor communication, poor tagging skills, super mutant, the sole survivor is a really tense person ok?, trashcan carla - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 21:09:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7122655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainXeno/pseuds/CaptainXeno, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stormbutterfly/pseuds/Stormbutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A couple days in the life. Sole Survivor goes walkabout with Nicky Valentine and MacReady. Mac has a love/hate relationship with traveling with these two, because they share memories of a past world, a better time. It's a window into that pre-war era, which he likes, but it's just a window. Not a door. He can peek through, but never go there. Banter, poor life choices fueled by psychojet, sarcasm, angst, more banter, and fresh molerat steak for breakfast. Really fresh. Like,  still biting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Slouching Towards Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a vignette or series of linked vignettes. 
> 
> My inspiration for this weird little piece? Well...
> 
> I love the poetic voice Stephen King slips into when he writes fantasy. 
> 
> I love the sparse yet somehow dense prose style of writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Wilhelmina Baird, Nancy Kress... 
> 
> (OK so I was an 80's kid all set to grow up and write the definitive cyberpunk novel and then the 90's ended.)
> 
> And I'm a sucker for road trip stories where the characters are in a new camp every night, new road calling them onwards every morning. 
> 
> Figured maybe Nick and the Sole Survivor might have been fans too. Maybe they live in the new world always a little conscious that they're living out the gritty low budget version of the cyberpunk film noir radio dramas of their youth.

The flat hack-hack-hack sound of full auto bursts woke Vera on her makeshift pallet, sunheated cardboard smooth against her cheek. Controlled bursts, not the long stuttering chatter of panic fire. “Oh come the fuck on, guys,” she groaned, and rolled up to sit cross legged.

Her faded black fedora was where close to she'd laid it, right beside the folded trench coat she used as a pillow. She’d rolled over in her sleep. Mac said she thrashed and yelled a lot in her dreams. Nightmares, probably. If so, she never remembered them. Her hat was upside down, now, with a can of pork and beans in it, label bisected vertically; half sunbleached sepia, peeling, weathered, the other half almost new. It must have sat on a shelf, part protected, part exposed to the wear of passing years. Nick. He didn't need to eat anymore. Didn't stop him from passive aggressive nagging everyone else to. Vera settled the hat on her head, swung the trench coat over her shoulder. The can of beans went into an inner pocket. Well. You never knew where food was coming from next. Her rifle’s stock fit the curve of her hands, heavy, smooth, like ballast in the belly of an airship. Some Russian model that came along after her time. 

“Давай за жизнь, давай брат до конца” angular scratched Cyrillic, carved in the top of the stock. The first two words were the only ones she knew. And those, only because of some brief words over drinks with opposing council, after a trial of a Spetznatz officer “Davai za…” she muttered. A toast. There was never time to be curious about the rest of it. Russians knew how to kill shit. It was a good gun. 

Her boots crunched on gravel, old concrete of the parking lot pulverized back into pebble sized chunks by two centuries of weather and mortar rounds. Nick and Mac stood shoulder to shoulder on what was left of the bombed our gas station’s roof, picking off bloatflies as they hovered over the swollen corpse of a pack brahmin maybe a hundred yards southeast. Mac was keeping score again. By the tally of spent brass lined up in neat clusters on the broken wall beside him, Nick was ahead by three.

“Waste of ammo, guys.” She unfolded her mirrored cop sunglasses, slid them on. “We’re not even headed that way.”

Nick shrugged, reached over, pulled a cigarette from the open pack peeking from her trench coat breast pocket. “Yeah? Somebody else will be, though. Call it a charitable act of community service. ”

Vera swung the long barrel of her rifle up, both eyes open, barely sighting through the scope. Squeezed the trigger four times during a slow exhale. Spent brass jingled by her feet. The last fat buzzing pests went spinning down. She never had the knack before the war. Went down into cryo barely good enough to pass the quarterly marksmanship tests the Army required of everyone, even desk jockey noncoms. Woke up a crack shot. Another question she doesn't have time to ask.

Mac whistled. “Why’d you hire me again?”

“To carry my shit,” she said over her shoulder as she left. He ducked out of the way, sniper reflexes brought his gloved hand up to snatch the can of beans before it hit his chest.

He tucked the can into the top of the brown canvas pack leaning against the wall. “Thought so,” he chuckled. Laughed so it would be a joke and not just observation.

“Guess we’re headed out,” Nick drawled, tugged the brim of his fedora down lower on his brow, turned the collar of his coat up. He nodded towards the north, at the narrow two lane highway broken into tilted plates of rubble. Vera was already walking along the shoulder of the road, blurred by heat shimmers rising from the asphalt. 

“Sh...would a simple ‘let's get going, guys’ be too much to ask?” Mac grumbled. He swung his legs over the edge of the the roof, hung by his hands, dropped. Dust puffed up around his combat boots. Nick landed harder, without bothering to hang by fingertips first. His knees whined with the flex of servos, faint hiss of hydraulics, at impact. They followed the tall brunette, jogging to close the lead she'd already gotten.

“So where we going?” Mac asked as he swung in beside her.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” she said, a sharp smile quirked the corners of her cracked red lips upward.

“Yeah, that's fine as far as cryptic and poetic goes. I was kinda hoping for a settlement name, though. What is that, anyway? Like a quote? Like from the Bible or something?”

Vera’s smile widened. “Yeah, Mac. Like from the Bible. Gospel of the apostle Stephen.”

Nick made a disapproving noise, crackle like static low in his vocoder output. “Kid’s confused enough already about history as it is. Besides, that's not the kind of thing you joke about, Vera.”

She took his offered hand as he boosted her over the lip of a small crater, swung her legs out of the way of spikes of rusted rebar that jutted from the broken edge of the low overpass. The pip-boy computer strapped to her left forearm chattered staccato geiger counter complaint. Vera glanced at it, grimaced. 

“Who’s joking, Nick?” she teased the old synth even as she reaches down to haul him up onto the next ledge. “Anyway, on a long enough timeline, all fiction ends up being prophecy. I'd say King, Stephen had a better handle on the future than the King James version. Not much use loving your neighbors and turning the other cheek when your neighbors are a pack of ferals.”

“Geez, it feels like watching my parents fight. Probably. I think. Give it a rest, willya?” Mac snapped. He passed his .308 up to Nick, left the Kalashnikov hanging from the shoulder strap. He laid his palms flat on the ledge, hopped a couple times for momentum, boosted himself up.

Nick and Vera exchanged a long look, pale blue eyes against flat metallic gold. Nick blinked first. Like those cigarettes he was always smoking. It was something he did because he liked to pretend he still needed to.

“Get a room, sheesh,” Mac teased, but bitterness showed through his tone like bones on a skinny feral dog. Nick handed his rifle back to him with a frown. When the trio had the caps for lodging, it was always two rooms, Vera and Nick in one, Mac in the other. He'd had too much of one of Hancock's mixed drinks and asked about it once. Vera had stared at him, then through him. After cryo, everything on her had thawed out pretty nice, Mac felt, except her eyes. “You snore,” she had told him, finally. 

“Never heard of these Kings. Only Kings I know of are a bunch of weird guys out in New Vegas. And come to think of it, they all try to act like some old King from ancient times too. What's so great about the past, anyway, except you geezers are from there?”

Vera shrugged, scanned the rising curve of the old highway. Smoke rose from a Gunner camp high on an overpass far ahead. A makeshift windmill turned faded red canvas sails. On the horizon, rumble of a vertibird running surveillance sweeps. She tugged hard at the thin links of her necklace, nervous tic like a junkyard mongrel pulling at his chain. “What's so great about it? Nothing, I guess. Like you said, it's just where I'm from. Hey. Five caps says I can hit that Brotherhood bird and get them to think those Gunners did it. Get us past easy while they’re busy taking potshots at each other.”

She crouched, slinking from the cover of a burnt out bus into the shadow of an overturned tanker truck.

“Was everyone in the past this bugnuts insane? Or am I just having my usual luck?” Mac groaned, and looked for a high vantage place to climb.

Nick snorted. The thin hiss of a med injector followed by the dull pop of a silenced 50 caliber round from Vera’s chosen cover interrupted whatever he'd been about to say.

“Fucking kill!” it was Vera’s voice, barely, low and ragged with adrenaline and chems. The vertibird engines spun up to a piercing turbine whine as the Brotherhood VTOL wheeled towards them in a hard banking turn.

“You heard the lady. Fucking kill.” Nick tipped his hat at Mac and slapped a fresh clip into his snubnosed .44.

“Language,” Mac muttered, and hooked his fingers on the metal scaffolding of a tall road sign, seeking height.

Then it was a long run, a hide and seek gunfight from cover to cover, up the old highway north, past the defunct Corvega plant, headed for the safe house in the projector booth of the ruined drive-in.

The shadows of abandoned cars had begun to lengthen, the still heat of the afternoon dispersed by erratic breezes, little puffs of wind that lifted hems of coats, blew trailing strands of hair into their faces. The sky to the far southwest was the muddy green of swamp water, and the air blowing up from that quarter smelled of wet concrete, with an aftertaste of burning bleach, ozone, and molten iron.

At the edge of hearing range behind them, Mac could still hear the choppy rattle of the Vertibird’s minigun cutting the sheet metal walls of the Gunner camp down into scraps.

“We didn't have radstorms,” Vera said, hoarsely, just loud enough for the other two to hear. She poured a splash of vodka on the dry scraps of pallets and broken pine branches piled in the ring of cinder blocks, then flicked the top of her novelty rocketship shaped lighter. 

“What?” Mac asked.

“That was something great about the past. No radstorms.” Vera said, flicked the lighter again.

The campfire caught this time, flared up, a sudden heat against faces and bare hands like the backwash of a rocket launch. Nick plunged the first two fingertips of his metal hand into the top of a can of creamed corn, peeled the lid back. Mac rummaged in his pack, passed over the can of pork and beans over for the same treatment. 

“So what about all these Kings? James and Steve and Presley? I thought the U.S. had presidents back then.” Mac pressed the subject, just to keep the quiet and dark from pressing in too close to the fire. Up in the hills out Tenpines way, something screamed, high, metallic and resonant, like tearing metal. Yao guai, maybe, or a young deathclaw. Or some idiot being hoisted on a meathook by Raiders. He hoped it was the latter, then tried to find a part of himself that felt bad for thinking it.

Vera took her hat off, folded her sunglasses and rested them on the brim. “Got a headache. Bad mix of chems,” she said. She sighed and fidgeted on the pile of maize leaves she’d heaped up into a bed, then rolled over in the sheet of vinyl she’d ripped off a fallen billboard, put her back to them both. Mac could read the word “Buttercup” across her lower back. The saccharine moronic smile of a robot pony toy smirked at him from between her shoulder blades. Nick shook his head and leaned over her to set the heated can of corn on the ground in front of her face. “I'll let it cool down...first…” her sleepy drawl trailed off into a tiny snuffled snore.

The synth detective mimed a sigh. The heave of shoulders was right, the small slump as he bowed his head, but the huff of breath sound from his voicebox was a couple seconds late. Nick was one long train wreck of missed timing.

They sat, watching fire turn wood into embers. The synthetic was quiet for so long that Mac forgot what he'd asked. For once, he sat as still as the machine he was, without any of the little fidgety motions he affected to show he was a person. He was motionless for long enough that the sniper twitched a little when Nick raised his head and turned the bright gold lamps of his eyes to him. Searchlight eyes, gunbarrel pupils. Subliminal click-whir as camera irises zoomed in to focus on something crashing through brush out in the dark past the chain link fence.

“Campfire story, huh?” he said, “Been a dog’s age. Let’s see if I can remember how it went. Don't know if I'll rightly tell it as good as King did, but I'll give it a go.”

Mac leaned in, elbows on knees, spooning down bites of lukewarm beans absent-mindedly. He listened as the old man spoke of a man named King who wasn't a king at all, of a black haired poor boy from the country who sang so sweet he was made the king of Rock and Roll, of a real King who ordered his wise men to find a way to change the words people once thought were written by a god. When the last firepit coals burned dimmer than the cherry of Nick’s cigarette, the synth told of a land named Gilead, founded by Arthur Eld. He spoke of a man named Roland, gunslinger by trade, and how he went west across a desert, through a world that had moved on from better days, chasing a man who carried a share of the blame for it. 

“Of course, the real tragedy was, the gunslinger was so determined to kill this fella, he didn't care what it was going to cost him. Or who got hurt along the way.” Nick finished. 

Mac’s breathing was deep and even. The empty tin can dangled from loose fingers. Nick had heard his heartbeat slow into sleep a half hour ago. It seemed like bad luck to stop a story before it's right ending, though.

Above their camp, the clouds that earlier rumbled threats of rain had cleared. Same old stars in their fixed courses, same planets locked in their path around the sun. Some of the lights up there moved in stately curving arcs across the black; satellites from back when rockets carried payloads other than warheads, their orbits slowly decaying over the decades. Now and then one came streaking down white hot, to leave another crater. Heckuva dust cloud every time, rising up over the Commonwealth’s horizon like twenty megatons of bad news, sounded like Armageddon every damn time. And every time it turned out when the dust settled, the world didn't end. It just moved on.

Mac woke in the monochrome gray just before sunrise with a crick in his neck, covered in dew, left leg buzzing with pins and needles from where the aluminum frame of the old cafe chair cut off circulation. On mental replay, it was the smell of burned coffee, pine resin, and the wet smack of a tire iron against meat that had pried his eyelids open.

“Shit!” Another smack, and a thick splatter of blood or brains sprayed across asphalt. Mac knew the noise.

“Oh really? Bite me, will you, little fucker?” Vera sounded pissed. Mac snagged the carry strap of his Kalashnikov from the back of the chair, worn webbing strap came easy into his hand. Not a great long range gun, but this morning's snafu sounded like close up work. Good piece. Reliable. The old Russkies knew how to kill sh- stuff good. 

More sounds of meat being beaten with metal. “Thought you had my back, Nick.”

“Dammit, Vera, I'm a detective, not an exterminator. Hey, check your 3 o’ clock.” the synth responded, gravelly edge of annoyance in his voice.

Mac came around the corner of the projection booth wall. Nick and Vera were back to back by the sludgy pool of water in the middle of the parking area. The android picked off yet another huge molerats from the circling pack of them with his .44, while Vera guarded his back. The piece of metal in her clenched fists looked like a broken length of fence post. The last two feet of it were red and wet. A couple dead rodents lay at her feet. The rodents were smart hunters, moved in zigzag ellipses too fast and close for a sure rifle shot.

“Morning, Mac. Glad you could join us.” Nick called.

Vera glanced at him, nodded once. “We got breakfast.”

“Breakfast got us, looks like,” Mac groused. The largest female poked her blind naked head out of the pack’s burrow again, made a screeling chitter at the upper edge of hearing. The five surviving rats closed in, three cubs, two big males. The flat staccato thwack of automatic weapons fire bounced off the big white movie screen as Mac fired. Short bursts, controlled, a few rounds at a time.

They came scrambling on curved yellow digging claws, chisel teeth bared. It took several hits before each dog sized rodent stumbled, staggered, fell, front paws folding under them mid stride. The last one, a fat cub with white parallel stripes of healed claw scars across his haunch, fell with his nose almost touching the metal toe cap of Vera’s left boot.

She kicked the corpse in the snout, crack of tooth clearly audible, then picked it up by a hind paw and dragged it behind her back up the shallow slope to their cookfire.

“Not sure you guys needed me for a few rats,” Mac teased. “Let's find something bigger to kill. Otherwise, what are you even paying me for?”

Vera dropped the dead animal on the wire mesh bottom of an upturned shopping cart. Laid her combat knife on it's side, leather wrapped handle toward Mac. “Because somebody's got to clean and dress these molerats.” She folded cross-legged onto her improvised bed roll, tilted her head back, shook the cold can of last night's corn over her open mouth to get the last few kernels.

“Right, I forgot.” Mac laughed to make it feel more like a joke, less like the truth. Nick fanned last night's embers awake with his hat.

It turned out that grilled molerat was not quite as awful as roasted dog, and definitely better than radroach, though not as tender. Mac helped Nick roll up some slices in dry maize shucks to take with them. Vera had shrugged at their efforts. It figured the android who didn’t even need food would end up playing campfire cook. She’d gone scrounging through the doorless buildings and windowless shells of cars while they fussed over rat cutlets, shoved a couple packs of mentats from the glovebox of a wrecked RobCo service van in her pack, stuffed a few ancient snack cakes from the concession stand into her pockets. Now she paced while the guys packed, her steps tracing pendulum swings towards the camp, then away. Each arc got longer, until she just kept walking, ducked through a bent gap in the chainlink, her tall form disappearing and reappearing through the branches of dead maple scrub as she climbed up the steep dirt game trail towards Tenpines farm.

“Looks like we’re heading out.” Nick drawled, swung his satchel strap over his head, tipped the brim of his old felt fedora lower, flipped the collar of his trench coat up to shade his face.

“What is so hard about the phrase ‘Hey guys,time to get moving,’ may I ask?” Mac shouted at the pale denim blue of the late August sky, his arms out to the sides, palms raised in an exaggerated pose of questioning. 

Vera was outlined against the crest of the low hill above them. She turned, hands on hips, then waved them onwards with a wide sweep of her arm. The morning breeze carried her voice the wrong way for them to hear the words, but Mac thought she might have been yelling “Come on!”

The sole survivor of the Sanctuary vault headed north across the mountains, and the hired gunmen followed.


	2. A Good Man Is Hard To Lose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vera is so annoyed at her traveling buddies that she leaves them at Nick's office in Diamond City and goes exploring south of Murkwater settlement alone.
> 
> She looks nice today. Or so the concrete wall tells her. And then, a series of unfortunate events sends the sole survivor running "shit, hell, damn, oh fuck me sideways!" all the way home. 
> 
> Also, Preston Garvey. He keeps using this word General. But Vera doesn't think it means what Preston thinks it means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coauthor credit to the lovely and bizarre Stormbutterfly, because her character and mine have had so many shared trials in life, 
> 
> like aggro pack brahmin on our roofs, 
> 
> deathclaws chasing us across the entire map,
> 
> settlers whose one life goal is apparently to settle in the south central neighborhood of the 8th ring of super mutant hell, 
> 
> and the worst scourge of all: Preston Freaking Garvey. 
> 
> She reassured me that I'm not the only one who takes off in a sprint when I see him coming to tell me one more stupid thing the asshats at Abernathy Farm need my help with.
> 
> Seriously. I keep expecting the quest "Untied Shoelaces At Abernathy Farm" where I have to go over there and... you know what? Just read the thing. I'm shutting up now.

A Good Man Is Hard To Lose:

 

***  
“You look nice today.” Vera read aloud.

Yep. That was what the graffiti said. In hurriedly painted red letters.

There was a stacked cinder block wall just inside the open door of the bunker. It said she looked nice. She laughed. Nice was not a word she applied to people anymore, least of all to herself. 

A difficult headshot from a too-far distance, with a rebuilt scope. That was nice, as in “Nice shot, Duncan!” Or, a score of pre-war chems in the drug locker of a burned-out pharmacy, only a few decades past their expiration dates. Also nice, as in “Nice score, Hancock!”

She read it again. Yep. You look nice today! That's what the wall said, in angular slashes of red spray paint across chipped gray blocks. The flat click of a relay switch shook Vera from her woolgathering. Rusted treads clattered into motion. She heard the snap of saplings and bushes crushed underneath the automaton. It rolled onward like the crackle of an oncoming brushfire. Whatever it was, it sounded big. Deep breath in, thumb back the hammer on her .45, let the air out slow, steady, turn. Aim. Fire. Again. Again. The siegebreaker automaton rolled relentlessly forward through the humped tussocks of sharp bladed swamp grass, gatling lasers spinning up to firing speed. Vera backed across the broken ground, a step at a time picking her footing, choosing her targets. Not panicking. Not thinking. Step back, check footing, aim, fire.

One of the first bits of advice Nick had offered ran through her mind. “Nothing works like it used to in these times,” he’d pointed out, “We’re all a little broken. Hey, it's a good thing. Everything has a weak spot these days; you just need enough ammo to find it.”

She kept his words pressed like paper flowers under the weight of other memories, took them out sometimes. It was good to know. A nice thought. 

***

The trouble was, Vera decided, as she stabbed the stimpack injector into her left upper thigh, that she didn't know how to deal with compliments anymore. Insults, sure. She could deal with that. Bullets, flung machetes, even very small shoulder mounted tactical nuke launchers, she could survive. All that was within the realm of her training, both pre-war military training. What the Army couldn’t teach her, she’d learned in the more recent post-cryo school of “sink or swim, vaultie.”

Whether swimming or sinking these days, Vera felt most at home when pushed off the metaphorical diving board into (glowing green) deep water.

But compliments? Nobody gave things away in the wasteland. Not even things of little value, not hairpins, bent rusted cans, or kind words.

"Commonwealth," Preston said to her often. "It's the Commonwealth We can't call it a wasteland and expect people to believe in building something better."

Commonwealth. Last time he'd mentioned it, she’d spat in the powdery dust near the toes of his cowboy boots. “Yeah, well, it has a lot in common with a wasteland. Especially in the way there's no wealth.”

"I dunno, there's a whole wealth of quick and ugly ways to get dead," Valentine had added.

Valentine was right. 

The mirelurk Queen that was hunting her shrieked, a chittering insectile buzz. If she hadn't been so determined to lead the siegebreaker bot into ground too swampy for it's weight, she'd have seen the giant mutated mud crab sleeping in the shallows. Well, might as well wish for a robot pony to ride home on. Vera slapped a fresh clip home and rolled out of cover. I'll make the Murkwater settlement, she promised herself. I'll lead this big bitch right into their laser turrets. We'll all have a crab boil for supper.

***  
The smell of that much burning crab meat was like an olfactory radio beacon, a big sign saying "good eats here" pinned on the back of the whole settlement. Yeah. Well, you killed the cubs and led the giant albino mama bear away from the surviving Murkwater settlers. That was what matters, she repeated to the nagging voice in her head, the one that sounded like failure, vaultie, noob. Yao guai, she reminded herself. They're not really bears anymore. I can't treat them like what they came from, or I'll misunderstand what they are now.

“Not that I did a hell of a lot of bear hunting type crap out on maneuvers with my unit,” she panted, just under her breath. Either the hill was getting steeper or her pack was getting heavier.

She stepped left behind the peeling gray slab of a dead hickory tree, dared to risk a look back over her shoulder. The mangy pale shape that had shadowed her the whole afternoon, all the way up the side of this damn mountain, was gone. Vera mopped sweat off her face with the cleanest patch of her fatigue jacket sleeve. It figured she'd climb halfway up the tallest slope between here and Diamond City to get away from a mutated animal that wasn't even following her anyway. 

“Shows what I know about bear hunting,” she complained, resettling the pack straps on her stiff shoulders. Aching muscles twinged like plucked wires. Under her jacket, the skin of her back felt wet and raw. Her mouth tasted like licking a live battery. The insides of her boots were sticky. With every step, her socks rubbed a crust of dried blood into the open blisters on her heels. 

She popped open the snap on the thigh pocket of her cargo pants. Two orange and white plastic RadAway injectors poked out of the wad of empty cigarette packs and crumpled cellophane snack wrappers. That last storm had passed close. Probably piling her pack onto a stack of life preservers that morning and wading chest deep through the filthy river hadn't helped. Molerats wouldn't cross deep water, though, so she'd hoped bear-guai didn't swim well either. Vera popped her thumb into her mouth and pressed experimentally against an upper molar. It didn't wiggle in the socket, but her thumb was streaked dull red when she pulled it out. Gums were bleeding again, then. The skin on the backs of her hands looked dry, thin, as if she could peel it like paper from a stick of gum. The moons of her fingernails were somewhere between purple and gray. Surely they were usually that color. Probably she hit her hands on things a lot these days. Vera glanced once more at the two injectors of radiation purging meds. It was a long walk up to Graygarden. The snap closure of the pocket was stubborn, gritty with rust. It took a bit of strength to force it closed.

The deliberate crackle of a dry branch uphill made her crouch, heartbeat throbbing quick at her temples and below her jaw. The silver-white glint of the Yao Guai’s eyes flicked past her and returned. The old hunter stared down from the top of the hill through a film of cataracts, purblind, swinging her head in a slow radar sweep back and forth. Her pink nose twitched, nostrils flared open to read the air. Warted jowls cracked open, catching Vera’s scent on her tongue.

“Not sure why I thought I was hunting you,” she told the blind scarred face. She moved smoothly, quietly, her hands lifting her rifle out of it's holster on her back. No need to check the safety. She'd disabled it a while back. The sow made a hoarse vowel sound, “Aaough, urrrh,” not a roar, almost a reply. It rose in tone at the end like a question.

“Yeah. I'm still here,” Vera answered. No matter what question the wasteland put to her, it was the only answer she had beyond name, rank, and ID number.

“Come on, then! If you're coming,” she yelled at the carnivore, inchoately angry out of nowhere, senselessly enraged at both of them, stubbornly doing what their kind each did, long after victory had value to either of them. The Yao Guai did roar then, and charged. Vera sidestepped and roared back, with a staccato burr of automatic fire. 

Later, it was two hours past dark but she was still walking, although she limped each time her weight came onto her right leg. Somebody was singing, a flat tuneless phrase, over and over.

“To see what she could see, to see what she could see… the bear went over the mou-oun-tain… to see what she could see…”

When the singer started over, Vera realized her lips were cracked, her mouth hot and dry, her throat burned like yesterday's tear gas. It hurt to sing, but she kept on anyway because it was easier to keep on than to stop, than to lie down and rest.

The trouble with sleeping in the wasteland was you never knew how long you'd be out for, or what you'd wake up to. Or what you'd miss while you were out cold.

***

“Stupid human!” the mutant soldier's voice was a gritty, gutteral rasp. He sounded more like a kid trying to imitate a radio villain’s minion.

“Now you die!” she howled back. After three days of dodging from skirmish to gunfight to cat and mouse shootouts, with no sleep and little water, her voice was almost as bad as his. Anyway, these guys must have all memorized their battle cries together or something. They never said anything she couldn't already have told tjem. 

“Now you...huh? What weakling human say?!” the mutant growled.

She cackled, and tumbled over sideways behind the huge, tire of a burned military transport. The rubber was deformed and melted to the road, but she remembered these airless tires as being fairly bulletproof. 

“What weak human say?” she mocked the mutant. Her skin felt tight and hot, and her head spun with every motion, but at least she'd stopped sweating a while back.

The giant gray-green brute pounded at his own head wildly with both fists. “Stop copying! STOP!”

Vera hacked out a coughing laugh. Stable, these guys were not. “Stop copying, sto-oop!” she mocked, putting an older sister's sarcastic sneer into her voice. These guys. Some super soldiers they turned out to be. Then again, she'd never seen one of them get mutant bear rabies or whatever she'd caught from the bite. So maybe there was something to that whole FEV virus, she found herself wondering. Go figure that a big green idiot on a steroid overdose rampage is what's adapted to living in the end of the world.

“Human!” the mutant brute bellowed. His voice was higher, a sharp nasal edge creeping in. “Human? You in head? How you inside head?”

It sounded like fear, she decided. That must be what they sound like scared. Never heard that before. 

This can't work, she told herself. “Human use radio machine, get in head,” she screamed back, letting a wild note of triumph creep in. “Hah! NOW how you kill human?!”

The mutant was shocked into near silence. She could hear the quick rough rasp of his breath, too close, just on the far side of the wrecked transport. He began screaming, open throated, head back, the primitive “AAAA, AAAAAAH, AAAH,” of a newborn who hasn't discovered consonants. 

Vera pictured him in enormous diapers with a mutant hound stuffed animal tucked under one arm. She curled behind the melted tire, one hand over her mouth to hold back the high quavering giggles she couldn't seem to stop. They really were big babies, sort of. Just huge cranky toddlers with guns, all in need of a spanking, a time out, and a nap.

The ruined sedans and trucks rang with great echoing whangs of struck metal as the mutant spun around and around in place, swinging his fists at random.

Vera pressed her palm harder over her open mouth, tasted road grit and old rubber. Her other hand patted at pocket after pocket, searching. There was, she thought she remembered, ah. Yes. One cryo grenade left. She'd get these giggles under control, then step out with the pin already pulled. The big dummy would still die. But at least he wouldn't die alone and scared of something he couldn't understand. 

The thin somehow clinical beep, beep, beep of a mini nuke’s self destruct warning sent her scrambling forward on hands and knees to squeeze under the delivery van across from her. For some reason, she hooked her elbow through the strap of her pack as she bolted. Something in her shoulder joint made a silent, painless popping sensation. She’d feel it later, maybe. Assuming there was a later to feel things in. As time seemed to slow, she noticed the faded blue paint on the van's bent side panel advertised those stupid Pulowski fallout shelters. She laughed harder, gasping out big bellowing shouts of laughter. 

“Nuclear protection on an extremely fucking tight budget!” she managed, between spasmodic cackles. There was an awful, still moment when her rifle holster caught on the frame of the truck. Then she jerked past, with an abrupt ripping fabric noise, to lie flat, face to pavement, eyes squeezed shut, hands over her head.

There was a terrible ghastly flood of light, like a camera flash recording a crime scene the size of a planet. White was not the word, like fast was not the word for a deathclaw. If it was a color she could name, then blinding white would have been it's shadow.

Silence, then a wall of noise like a radio tuned to static under a sheet metal roof during a hailstorm. There was a great saurian cry of torn and bending metals. The truck slid sideways a few feet, dragging her along. 

Silence again, broken by the clink and crackle of cooling molten pavement, the occasional bang-whack of falling debris landing on a car, then ricocheting onto asphalt. She heard a distant crash and tinkle of breaking glass. On her left wrist, the Pip boy’s Geiger counter buzzed like an angry cicada.

“Thank you for choosing Pulowski,” she wheezed. She couldn't hear her own voice, not really, but it vibrated in her throat and along the bones of her jaw. “Wait for radiation to clear -- and enjoy your stay!”

At least this answered the question of when when to use those last two doses of Rad-X.

***

The lone mutant had a shelter, it turned out; a makeshift guard post on wooden posts, in sight of the road. It was whacked together out of sheet metal, old car doors, plates of steel ripped off the fuselage of an airplane. 

On the side of the shelter, a rebar cage hung, locked with a powder coated aluminum storm shelter door. In the cage, Vera found a skeleton in a filthy blue housedress. Hatchling radroaches the size of mice picked the last stringy scraps from gray bone. The skeleton’s pelvis was cracked badly, and the thin bones of the right forearm had been snapped. The damage had been done a while ago, she decided, because the breaks had begun to heal, thin ridges of raised bone bridging the cracks. But not too long past, because the empty places hadn't had time to fill in completely before the skeleton’s owner died. The skeleton’s hair was dull auburn, with an inch of sandy blonde roots.

Vera reached through the uneven bars to search. In the front dress pocket, five broken bobby pins and a folded note scrawled left handed and near illegible on the back of one of Piper’s broadsides. A safe terminal password, it looked like, and some names of places and maybe people who lived there. The keyhole of the cage door was surrounded by a tracework of shallow scratches. Vera yanked a hairpin from the dirty tangle of her braid. She picked the lock. Left handed. Just so she'd know. It was a stupidly easy one, if you had the trick of it. There’d been dozens just like it in just about every house and office back in Vera’s day. People locked up stuff that nobody would bother to steal, back then. And then misplaced their keys because the stuff didn’t matter much. Ridiculous that such a small, stupid thing could keep a person from leaving. How stupid, to die in a cage secured with a lock an injured military lawyer could pick left handed with a hairpin. Stupid skeleton. Sweat and dirt was in Vera’s eyes, making them run and water. She swiped the drops away with a rough sweep of her jacket cuff. Even though she didn't really need to see what she was doing. The door clicked open and swung wide. "There you go, skeleton lady. You're still dead as all hell, but at least you made bail. Better get going." She said. Some of the roaches fled at the sound of her voice. Others stayed. Well, you couldn't complain about the dead being hard to live with. It was everyone still walking around that gave Vera a hard time. The skeleton had good teeth. She looked she would have been nice, maybe. Vera left the hairpin in the lock and went looking for something worth stealing. The dead woman kept smiling in the open cage. *** 

The mutant’s shack reeked of sweat, rotten food, and cordite. There was vodka, though. She poured the first splash over her Yao Guai bite, rolled her eyes back and hissed through gritted teeth like a cowboy in an old western. 

The solar panel that powered the safe’s access terminal had been yanked loose from the roof. Vera twisted the broken ends of same colored wires together, wrapped the splices with duct tape, crumbly and too sticky with age, and hoped. These days, there were places where that level of common sense made her something between a repair technician and a shaman. After she'd blown out every bulb in the little glowing plastic rockets and stars while trying to assemble the new crib mobile, she'd replaced the tiny bulbs and tried again. When her second attempt had tripped the breaker for the whole nursery, Codsworth had taken the tattered instructions away from her and made tea to distract her while he finished. The teacup didn't match any others in the house. It leaked, but slowly enough that she could sip rather than gulp. The tea was made from hubflowers. It made her lips swell and go mostly numb. 

Here, though, in the makeshift roadside guard shack, the terminal flickered on, dim green letters on scuffed black screen. The badly scrawled word at the top of the skeleton lady’s note was the password for the safe. “Exhumed.”

In the safe, Vera found plenty of chems. All kinds. She jabbed a Rad-away into the muscle of her haunch, and a stimpack into her bitten leg. The chems were modern make. There was nothing pre-war, but it all looked neat and well made. Somebody had been a good cook, or known one. The bottom shelf of the safe was filled with scavenged electronic components organized by type into old tin lunchboxes and used ammo cases. Four plasma grenades. A canned Salisbury steak, a few other cans of veggies, although Vera would rather finish her remaining cuts of mirelurk and Yao Guai first. She could get back home on this, and have plenty to barter. Unzipping her pack, she laid out her bags and bundles of salvage, inspecting them with an eye to weight versus value and usefulness. The note she'd found got wrapped in three layers of plastic and tucked in the innermost pocket of the pack, first thing. At least she could try to get word to...whoever was left. Best she could do by way of repayment. Vera was starting to think she could get real tired of owing favors to the dead.

***

She stumbled into Sanctuary dragging her backpack along the road behind her. It rattled with fuses and heating elements and plasma coils. Her armor smelled of swamp water, mutant hound drool, burning plastic, and blood. There was still mirelurk ichor crusted sticky in her hair. It swung against the side of her face with every halting step. 

Preston looked up from his metal and scrap wood guard shack. He tried to take one strap of the pack. Vera knocked his hand away with a jerk of her elbow.

“You came back just in time, General,” he began, “There’s been a radio message from Abernathy farm.”

“Let me guess. Ghouls.” She rasped, voice still raw from breathing the smoke of burning vertibirds and the dust kicked up by last night's radstorm. She walked past him, head down, pulling her load slowly, stubbornly, like a caravan brahmin.

Preston settled his hat more firmly on his head and followed at her heels. “Right. They sounded pretty desperate, so if you could get out that way as quick as possible, that would do a lot to spread the good word about the Minutemen. All right? Vera? How soon do you think you could make it out there?”

She just walked past him. The smack of small arms fire reached her from the cul de sac at the end of the street. Vera didn't look up, just kept putting one boot in front of the other, the strain of the pack strap tugging at the sore socket of her healing shoulder.

There was a brahmin standing on the roof of her old house. Sturges, Cait, and Marcy Long were in the road in front of her driveway, firing .22 pipe pistols in the general direction of the animal. Trashcan Carla was a few yards beyond them, both hands on her skinny hips, lit cigarette in her mouth, as she squinted up at her pack beast. The cow didn't seem interested in the situation. It was Carla’s, after all, Vera thought. Probably not the first time it’s been shot at this week. 

Nothing was actually on fire, or full of radroaches, then. Good enough.

She shouldered her front door open, hauled the pack down the hallway into her bedroom, dropped the pack on the floor, and fell facedown across her bed. 

Preston cleared his throat. The shadow of that damned cowboy hat of his stretched across the faded peeling wallpaper in front of her. “So, about the folks at Abernathy. What should I tell them?” he pressed for an answer.

“I'm the General of the Minutemen, right?” she said into the musty fabric of her pillow “And the title isn't just a pretty hat to wear, right? I can call the shots, give the orders? Yeah?”

Preston nodded. The shadow on the wall moved with him. “I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't come along. That's why I knew you should take the position. You have what it takes to inspire people, do what nobody else can, make the hard decisions…”

“OK. Watch me,” she broke in, “Here I go, making a decision. Specifically making the hard decision to let somebody else who isn’t me handle this, and giving YOU the order to leave me alone.” she said.

“You can't just leave those people being attacked by ferals. You can't just pretend it's someone else's problem to deal with.” He argued.

“I'm not pretending it's somebody else's problem. I know damn well it is,” she replied.

“But we’re the only group looking out for the settlers and caravaners and regular people just trying to get by. If you don’t help them, who will?”

“Ah,” Vera said, “You keep using the word General. But it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. Back in my day, in the Army, we had this amazing technology called ‘delegating.’ Watch this.” She lifted up on one elbow, turned her head towards the glassless hole of the window above her bed. “Hey! Cait! You out there?” she yelled over the hammering sounds of sheet metal being nailed inexpertly to the carport wall.

“Oi! What is it, Blue?” the pit fighter hollered back.

“Fucking ferals in the old shipping yard bothering the dumbasses down at Abernathy again.” Vera called.

“Shite on a stick! What, again, already? Can’t those tato-grubbing arseholes shoot straight?” Cait swore.

Vera rolled over, sat up, and poked her head out the window. “Doesn’t look like it. Round up Strong and Duncan, maybe a few of the recruits, and go clear ‘em out for me, will ya?”

The hammer hit the side of the house with an echoing clang, then bounced off the concrete pad of the carport. “Fuck that sideways with a bonesaw, Blue. Ain’t happening,” she yelled.

Vera threw her hands in the air in frustration and mouthed a few silent obscenities, before speaking again. “You know that full case of Gwinnett Lager I traded for on my last run down to Diamond City?” she asked.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Cait rasped, and spat on the ground. “All right. Consider it done. I’ll grab my pack and tell the boys we’re heading out.”

Vera laid back down on her back, folded the grease stained pillow in half and shoved it under her head. She closed her eyes.

“There. Consider it a free lesson in people skills.” She told him.

Preston opened his mouth, closed it again when no sound came out. He settled for saluting, and leaving her to rest.

He was gone for no more than a few seconds before Sturges leaned in through the window frame. “Boss? Hey, there you are.” Vera opened one eyes, mopped dried blood off her forehead with one filthy shirt sleeve. “Yes, Sturges?” she gritted through clenched teeth.

“What did you want us to do about this here cow on your roof? Just shoot it, or keep trying to scare it down, or what?” he asked.

Trashcan Carla’s wrinkled face appeared beside Sturges’s shoulder in the window. “You put a bullet in my Bessie and you’ll never see an independent trader in these parts again. I’ll make sure of that.”

Vera sighed, rolled to her feet, and yanked her Gauss rifle off the rack beside her bed. She leaned out the window, shoving Sturges out of the way, and propped her elbow on the sill to brace herself.

“Don’t you dare!” Carla yelled, and lunged, hands outstretched to grab the barrel of Vera’s gun. At the same moment, Sturges body checked the caravaner, slamming his shoulder against hers. The tough old trader staggered a few steps to one side, and caught her balance. While Sturges and Carla struggled, Vera sighted down the muzzle, and fired, six shots.

The two front supports of the carport roof were suddenly each missing three feet of aluminum post from their centers. The severed ends glowed dull orange. With a piercing creak of bent metal, the whole front end of the sheet steel roof slowly keeled down until the front porch’s rain gutter nearly touched the driveway.

“Get some maize or something. Whatever food brahmin like. I dunno. Lead her down the nice new ramp.” Vera said, voice flat and steady with the effort of not screaming. She lay back onto her lumpy pillow. “Now everyone go the fuck away and let me sleep. I order you all to go do normal shit for the next six hours. Just... go do whatever people who aren't insane do. Farm some razorgrain. Clean some guns. Fix that damn water purifier. Absolutely nobody is allowed to get kidnapped by ghouls, or marry a super mutant, or adopt a deathclaw egg. Whatever you think Hancock would do, don't do that. For six. Freaking. Hours.” She sighed and rubbed at her temples, wrinkled her forehead in pain. "Speaking of zombie pirate mayor, find him and have him get me a Med-X." She flopped down onto the mattress for a moment, then opened her eyes again. "Oh. And the next one of you I see joyriding in my T-51 suit, I will shoot you. In the dick. And then I'll let Danse shoot what's left. The crap I go through...to find fusion...cores..." her hoarse voice trailed off into slurred half words, as her eyelids slid closed again.

Sturges looked from the wrecked carport, to the brahmin peacefully chewing her cud on the roof, then to his General. He took a breath and started to speak.

“Uh uh, sonny boy,” Carla broke in, taking him by the elbow and leading him away from the window. “How ‘bout we let your crazy General girlie get some shut-eye.” Sturges nodded, although he shot a couple more disbelieving glances back over his shoulder as the older woman let him down the main street of Sanctuary towards the communal vegetable patches at the town’s center.

“Word of advice, youngster,” Vera could just barely hear Carla tell him as they left, “When a woman gets that expression on her face when she's talking to you, it's time to cut your talking back down to just ‘yes ma'am’ and ‘no ma'am’. And you best hope that buys you time to back away real slow and peaceable-like so’s you can go hide all the kitchen knives and unload every gun in the house you can find.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sturges replied.

Carla chuckled and patted the back of his hand. “Good boy. Quick learner. I like that.”

Vera lay back. The roof beams creaked softly as the brahmin on the roof above her bedroom shifted position. Dust sifted down through the slanting beams of late afternoon sun. The stuttering rattle of automated machine gun turrets picking off wild dogs down by the riverbank was a soothing counterpoint to the sharp rap of settlers’ hammers at the latest shack going up in piecemeal sections across across the street. Number eight turret’s motion tracking sensor was about to burn out. She could tell by the way it fired in a counterpoint rhythm to the others, a couple seconds behind. She’d fallen asleep to worse lullabies.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half this crap actually happened to my character, btw. 
> 
> I don't know how they do it. 
> 
> But in a blue moon, I'll come tromping, overencumbered, slightly crippled, and glowing in the dark, across the bridge into Sanctuary, 
> 
> only to find that Carla's mutant flying magical pack brahmin is stuck on my roof again.
> 
> And for some reason, my settlers take this as a personal insult to the honor of the Minutemen in general, and the honor of me, their General, in specific. So they shoot at the brahmin. 
> 
> It seems to be a magical immortal cow, though. 
> 
> If I want it to get off my roof, I have to build stairs on to my roof and punch the cow in the behind.
> 
> That sounds like work.
> 
> Instead I have decided to simply adopt the philosophy that cows on the roof are perfectly fine. 
> 
> They don't seem to count as nearby enemies, so they don't stop me from being rocked to sleep with a gentle lullaby of small arms fire and angry Brahmin mooing.
> 
> Also, I have been chased across the entire map by enemy after enemy, scraping one aggro mob off onto the next one I stumble across. It's probably a metaphor for something.


End file.
